golden
by wallywesting
Summary: he was painfully, obviously human/ in which Clint loses his hearing in the aftermath of a blast and realizes that silence isn't golden, it's an ache, a hollowness, and a reminder of just how fragile he really is.


**A/N: So after I had this chilling on my hard drive for a few days, I read somewhere that Clint is actually deaf, and now this is not an AU! *victorydance***

golden

The noise was deafening, at first. Overwhelming. A cacophony of blood rushing through his veins and his heart pounding against his chest and the snap of the string of his bow as he released arrow after arrow, the screaming of people all around him, the orders streaming into his ear, mechanical and filtered, his teammates yelling, his attention divided between staying as focused as he could and craning his neck around to see what Natasha was doing every second or so as he reloaded. There was too much to focus on, and he didn't have the hyperawareness of Captain America or the sensors built into his suit like Iron Man. He only had his mind, and that had suited him fine before. Until he glanced behind him at Natasha again as he strung another arrow and caught sight of something blinking red in the corner of his peripheral vision, something he had missed before, something that the noise had washed out completely.

"Grenade!" he screamed, and it exploded.

White. It fell over his eyes like someone was shining a flashlight directly into them and even as he closed his eyes the light would not go away. It was blinding and some tactical part of him knew that severe damage had been done to his retinas but basic human instinct turned his SHIELD training straight off, and all that was left was a hot panic that slid through him like it was oil, slow and excruciating. Feeling came to him in snapshots. A sickening pain in his left side as he crashed into something hard and solid. Warm blood oozing down his face. A pair of hands grabbing his shoulder and turning him over. And a persistent ringing in his ears, far away and quiet, and as unconsciousness took him, he held onto the ringing until that too faded.

He awoke in the infirmary in Stark's tower, and as soon as he was aware of this, he was aware that he could see and that this was a miracle. A hand touched his, soft and small, and he knew Natasha would be sitting next to him, watching over his broken body as it healed, but he couldn't turn his head to see her so he waited to hear her voice assure him that he was safe but he couldn't. He couldn't hear anything.

"'Tasha," he said. He felt the sound scrape against his disused vocal cords, felt the rasp escape his lips, but no sound fell upon his ears. He tried again, with more urgency, but there was nothing. Not his unbroken hand patting the sheets, not the beeping of the machines sustaining him, not Natasha's voice as she hovered over him, her lips moving quickly as her hands flitted over his face. Nothing.

He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply, and SHIELD training found him again. A catalogue of his injuries found that he had stitches on his hairline, there were cuts and scrapes on the left side of his face, along with the odd stitch. Shrapnel from the blast, his mind supplied immediately. His left arm was completely incased in plaster, there were several bruised ribs wrapped underneath his hospital gown, his leg seemed fine but after an experimental kick he called out in pain and realized he had twisted his knee. His entire left side was out of commission, probably for months. And he had gone deaf. The blast had ruined his ears.

Natasha came to his other side and sat at the edge of his bed, her eyes boring into his, her face a mask of calculated calm, but he could see the edge no one else would be able to, the panic in her eyes.

"It's okay," he said. He felt the vibrations on his lips as he spoke, the scratch in his throat as the sounds emerged. "It's okay, Nat."

She nodded, and bent down to press her forehead against his, her arms encircling him as tightly as she dared, until he lost consciousness again in her arms.

It might have been an hour later when he jolted awake and found Natasha curled under the covers against his unharmed side, her breathing deep and measured. For a moment, he tangled his fingers in her hair and breathed in her familiar scent and told himself that he was lucky to be alive, even though the absence of sound was almost too loud for his damaged ears and he felt like he was underwater, moving sluggishly against some unseen current. His chest was tight, his eyes burning. He ducked his face in her hair and tried to center himself and then he felt a presence on his other side. He strained his neck as he turned and was hit by a dull throbbing at the base of his skull but managed to turn his head around to look.

It was Steve. He sat on a chair close to his bedside, holding a little black book, his lips moving as he read from it. When he looked up and saw Clint watching him, he gave him a small smile that didn't reach his tired eyes and said, "I'm sorry."

Clint's eyes moved from Steve's lips and he looked into the soldier's eyes, feeling a little insulted. It was easy to see Steve's thoughts. He was the designated leader of the motley crew, he was in a way responsible for them. But Clint didn't need to be babied. He could take care of himself.

Well, not really, he thought ruefully.

But before anything could be said, the man promptly left the room.

Stark and Banner came and woke him up the next day, or maybe a week later, he had no idea, there were no windows and someone had taken his watch, and the drugs swirling around in his blood threw him into a deep black nothingness he seemed to only emerge from for moments at a time. He could turn his head when he felt a change in the distribution of air in the room and saw the scientists enter through the sliding glass door, Stark shooing Natasha out of his bed and Banner injecting something into his forearm before checking the flashing of some machine by his head.

Banner's lips moved around a long sentence, and he glanced at Stark questioningly. Stark rolled his eyes as he plopped down where Natasha had been laying and shined a light into both of Clint's eyes, and he winced as the memory of the blast seemed to burn inside him. He was as fragile as a baby, he thought bitterly. Fragile and weak and nothing like the Clint he used to be, and for a moment the thought was like a physical pain in his head, that he would be like this forever.

Stark tapped his shoulder and said something slowly, his mouth moving strangely. Clint caught the words, "damn" and "bastard" and "pain" and then Stark touched his own ears and pointed at Clint's.

"I don't know what you're saying," Clint told him.

Stark rubbed his face with his hands and snapped his fingers impatiently at Banner, who pulled a pen and a notepad from his pocket and passed it over. Stark scribbled something quickly and held up the notepad for Clint to see.

The handwriting was small and cramped and messy, but legible: _Do you feel any pain in your ears?_

Clint shook his head. He didn't miss the sharp look Stark gave Banner but he wished he did. His eyes searched the room for Natasha and he found her leaning back against the glass of the door, her eyes watching the exchange with ill-disguised anxiety. He wanted to reach for her but his good arm was heavy, hard to lift. He wondered what Banner had injected him with.

"Will I get better?" he asked the room at large.

Natasha left abruptly. He followed her with his eyes, his heart pounding in his chest, his breathing hitching in odd places as the drug began to take effect. Stark placed a hand on his shoulder and gave him a careless smile.

He wrote, _You better, Legolas._

Clint dove into unconsciousness again.

He was discharged by the men of science a while later, when his knee had set enough for him to place weight on it without unsettling it again, and as Natasha held his arm and they walked slowly to his room, he couldn't believe how losing his hearing had completely taken his sense of balance. He had once prided himself on being able to stand on one foot on the corner of a ledge on a fifty story building while still being able to aim impeccably. Now he would have given both his arms to hear his footfalls on the marble floor of the tower, to listen to Natasha as she whispered in his ear instead of just feeling the rush of her breath against his skin, to appreciate the sound of her heartbeat as she lay beside him on his bed, her eyes never leaving his even as she helped him change into something loose and comfortable.

_I can't believe you didn't see the grenade_, she wrote on the notepad he now carried with him at all times.

He shrugged, turning his gaze to the ceiling, tired and weary and full of questions nobody wanted to answer.

She held the notepad over his head so he had no choice but to read the words written hastily onto the paper, the hand that wrote them leaning heavily on the pen so that in some places, she almost tore holes in her anger. _You were busy watching me. I saw you. I've told you I don't need you looking after me before, you are an idiot I hate you I hope you're happy now I_

The words fell off the page and ended suddenly, and when he looked up at her inquisitively, it was to see that she was staring resolutely out the window of his room, out onto Manhattan and the city noise he couldn't hear, her eyes shining. He reached for her hand and said, "'Tasha," and she left the room, leaving him alone in the deafening silence.

Thor swung by his room later, dropping his hammer on the floor with a thud that reverberated in Clint's bones and holding a box of pizza with grease coating the cardboard in earnest. The demigod shouted and walked about the room touching things and his every step was a distraction that Clint found he desperately needed, and when a lull in Thor's one sided conversation came about and he stood by the window in a blast of sunlight that made his blonde hair shine like a light, Clint had found the strength to sit up and take a slice of pizza, and could ignore the strange feeling that not hearing his chewing gave him.

Thor took the notepad and the pen and scribbled something quickly before holding it before Clint, and his eyes were kind and wistful. _You forget sometimes that you are only human_.

"Not lately," he muttered automatically. It was strange to speak and not hear his own words, to not hear how loud or how quiet they were coming out, but he couldn't bring himself to write anything down.

Thor shook his head and wrote _It is not a weakness. It is your greatest strength._

Clint was about to open his mouth to ask how that could possibly be when Banner appeared and kicked Thor out of the room, and he was alone again in the quiet.

He spent time in the lab with Banner and Stark and watched as they tinkered with the head of Iron Man's suit with optimism bursting out of them in waves as he walked gingerly around their workspace and tried to work the soreness out of his knee. They would come to him with flashlights and tweezers and took his blood and poked in his ears with long, thin metal sensors and then they would retreat to Iron Man's head again, talking excitedly while Clint hoped and wished and prayed for something, anything. He stepped over to Stark's table and patted his shoulder as the man squinted through his goggles into the depths of Iron Man's head and asked, "What are you doing?"

Stark gave him an impatient look and wrote quickly on the notepad before pressing it to Clint's chest and pushing him lightly away in one motion.

Annoyed, he went back to his room and threw himself onto his bed and didn't look at the notepad he held loosely in his hand until he was about to fall asleep.

_Silence is golden, hawk shit_, it read.

Fuck you, Stark, he thought vehemently, because he did not feel golden at all. There was nothing golden about this.

The night they removed his stitches and taped mittens onto his hands so he wouldn't itch the healing skin, he awoke to find Natasha lying beside him, trailing her fingertips over his forehead like butterfly kisses, and he kept his eyes on her lips as she spoke. He thought for a moment that through his will alone his ears should work, that nothing at that moment, not his body or his mind, was as powerful as the will to hear her. He knew inside that she was saying something of dire importance and he couldn't understand anything.

"I can't hear you," he said as quietly as he imagined he could, the words like a breath coming out of his mouth. He felt panic, as severe and urgent as the day the explosion broke his body, even though there was no danger, but Natasha said something else and fell silent, her lips brushing his head, and he knew a weight on his chest he had never felt before. "I can't hear you," he said again. He thought he hiccupped but he didn't really know, couldn't know, not with the silence pressing on his ears and the world, so big and loud and full of life, condensed into this moment, wrapped in Natasha's arms while she tried to be enough to hold back whatever he was feeling but she was failing as he had failed them both.

"I wasn't enough," he said to her.

She pulled back to look at him and shushed him with a glare but he couldn't stop the thought from consuming them. He hadn't been enough to save himself from this, when he had always been enough to save others, to string a bow and let it fly while he himself was in midair and the target was zigzagging beneath him, to hit the bullseye while rain was falling around him and creating a fog that he could barely see through. He had been enough to be a part of a team of extraordinary people, a team of gods and superheroes when he himself was only a man, something he had never considered before this. And all at once he knew what Natasha was saying, why she seemed so angry with him. He never saw himself as a man. He saw himself as so much more, even without the flashy powers and the hammer and the radiation coursing through his veins. He fancied himself indestructible, and now he was as breakable as anyone could ever be. He was painfully, obviously human, and so was Natasha, but the difference between them was that she never forgot that. And he had.

She kissed his face and he realized to his horror that there was wetness around his eyes. He hastily wiped them away and focused on breathing as steadily as possible as she held him close to her and words vibrated in her throat and rumbled in her chest.

He went down to the shooting range soon after and sat up in the rafters, unable to use his bow with his left arm still in its cast, but the familiarity of the feeling, of being high in the air looking down at everything, was soothing. He felt reborn, alive again, as though all the time he had spent recovering from his most dire injuries and the shock they had left him in had burned him to ashes and now he was rising again, not like before, but better, more alive, more Clint than he had ever been. He shot bullets into a moving target with his right hand and built strength back into his legs, and the balance he had lost was found again when Banner came to inject him with something and found him walking along the thin support beam on the ceiling with surety, and Banner's tired face lit up with a smile and hope glittered plainly in his eyes.

_You look more like yourself every day_, the good doctor wrote on the notepad Clint passed him when he had climbed down to the ground.

He nodded, although he was still unable to look at himself in the mirror for very long, his face a map of still healing scars from where the shrapnel had broken his skin and turned the familiar sight of his face into something strange and different.

_Stark and I may have come up with something_, he next wrote. _It's based on the tech he uses in his Iron Man suit to transmit sound waves and we think we might use it to bring your hearing back_.

His heart leapt and he didn't bother trying to mask the hope that sprang to his face as he might have before. Emotion had been something to smother before he lost his hearing. Now it was something to feel, something that filled the void left where all the sounds went when they passed his ears.

Natasha held his hand as they prepped him for surgery, and the sight of Stark holding a scalpel in his gloved and sterilized hand was chilling. Natasha cradled his face in her hands and said something and he wondered why the hell she didn't just write down what she wanted to say instead of just letting her words fall on his useless ears but seeing her lips curve around the words was as soothing as actually hearing them would have been and he kept his eyes on her, hanging on her every movement until Banner shoved the notepad into his line of vision.

_If this works, your hearing would be a little sharper than it had been before_, he wrote. _You will be able to hear things that are further away. It might be a little overwhelming at times. Lots of noise. You'll be deserving of your nickname_.

"Hawkears." He saw Stark's lips form the word and smiled.

Natasha wrote, _You don't have to do this_.

Stark pulled the notepad out of his hands when he had barely finished Natasha's sentence and gave her a look before turning to a new page and writing, _She just doesn't want to be the only normal human on the team_.

That's right, he thought. If his hearing became above that of a normal human's, then he would be as unique as the rest of the team. He thought this would cheer him up but it didn't do anything but pique his interest.

Stark said something to Natasha and she glared at him until he retreated behind Banner. And then the mask was placed over his face and he was told to count back from ten, but he only made it to five before blackness found him.

He dreamed he was falling.

And he jolted awake, his head tender and raw feeling, his arm connected to the cool press of an IV, his heart beating hard against his ribs. And he could hear.

The sounds were minimal but loud and crashing, the beeping of the machines around him was deafening, the buzzing of the fluorescent lights was overwhelming, the sound of his breathing disrupting the sheets stretched around him was too much. He lifted his hands and pressed them to his ears but even then he could hear as clearly as though someone was holding the remote and raising the volume to unbearable heights.

Gentle hands pulled his down to his sides, and Natasha turned off the machines and then the lights, and left only with the sounds of their too loud breathing, he felt his muscles relax until he lay limply on the bed, his eyes staring vacantly into hers as his mind tried to adjust to the almost foreign sense of hearing again.

"'Tasha," he breathed, not daring to raise his voice above a whisper. "Say something. Talk to me."

"I'm here," she whispered back. "I'm here."

His ears took her voice and twisted it like a knife in his brain and he wrestled his hands out of hers and covered his ears again, closing his eyes, trying to block it out. "Too loud," he told her.

She left and brought Stark with her.

"What's happening, Hawkears?" he asked. "Silence not golden enough?"

"He says everything's too loud," she told him.

Clint cracked an eye open and felt Stark place something onto his ear, like a clip on earring that was cold and hard, and the click it made, so close to his ear, made him gasp and clutch the sheets in a grip like a vise.

And then the sounds weren't so bad anymore. He took breath after breath, savoring the quiet that took him, familiar and soft on his battered brain. He opened both his eyes and sat up. Natasha's eyes were wide and they followed his every motion, his arms lifting him onto a sitting position, his hand groping at the metal thing clipped to his ear.

"See, I thought it would be too loud too, but we couldn't know how much to adjust it down until you woke up," Stark rambled. His voice was just as Clint remembered it, his words quick and rushed. He listened to every letter, the sounds the syllables made as they crashed together into one sentence. "But it's adjustable, so when you want, we can test out just how far you can hear now. You're a proper superhero, Clint, not a poseur anymore."

Natasha pursed her lips but said nothing to Stark, nudging him out of the way.

"Clint, are you okay?"

His head turned so quickly, his neck made a sound of protest but he ignored it, and he told her, "Say that again."

She laughed and it was like a melody, like a balm. His eyes burned and he ducked his head. Chuckling, Stark left the room and he had barely closed the door after him before Natasha came to sit beside him and he grabbed her and pressed her into him and didn't let her go until she whispered, "Okay, don't kill me, you freak."

"Freak?" he repeated, and he listened to his own voice for a moment, curving around the words and sitting like a deep bass in his mind for a moment until fading into silence.

"You're just like them now," she said. "You have something in you that makes you different. I might leave you for a normal human man."

He laughed, the feeling light in his chest, the sound bouncing around the room. "You should be lucky to have me. I'm a real hero now."

"You've always been a real hero, Clint," she said softly.

He cradled her close to him as they basked in the quiet and he listened to her heart beat, the breath circulate in her lungs, relief flooding through them both as his ears caught what they couldn't before.

Footsteps on the floor above, someone talking past the previously soundproof doors, the city outside and its cacophony of sounds fell into the background and Clint thought it wasn't silence, but it was as golden as it was going to get right now, in between so very human and not quite and Natasha's heartbeat was like a lullaby in the busy air of noise around him.


End file.
